The consolidation wave that has hit the semi industry could soon yield tax inversion deals for foreign firms similar to deals seen in the healthcare industry, says FBR's Christopher Rolland.

Inversion deals allow U.S. companies buying foreign firms to see lower tax rates if less than 80% of the equity in the new company is owned by legacy U.S. shareholders, and the post-merger company has substantial foreign ops.

Rolland thinks ARM (ARMH), NXP (NXPI), Mellanox (MLNX), and Taiwan's MediaTek could be among the foreign companies targeted by U.S. chipmakers. Worth noting: Mellanox sells more than just chips, and ARM's business model depends on the company maintaining a neutral status within the industry.

Mellanox (MLNX+1.7%) strengthens its 100G hand some more by acquiring IPtronics, a Danish maker of components for high-speed optical interconnects, for $47.5M in cash. Mellanox says the deal, which follows its May purchase of silicon photonics interconnect firm Kotura, will help it deliver "end-to-end optical interconnect solutions at [100G] and beyond." Both purchases appear aimed at dealing with the long-term threat posed by Intel (INTC), which (with the help of acquisitions) wants to integrate InfiniBand controllers onto its server CPUs, and bake 100G silicon interconnects into its server platforms.

Mellanox (MLNX) is acquiring Kotura, a developer of silicon photonics interconnect tech, for $82M in cash. The deal, which is expected to be accretive to 2014 EPS by $0.01-$0.03, is noteworthy in light of Intel's (INTC) efforts to both develop both InfiniBand solutions and 100G silicon photonics interconnects for its server CPU platforms, with the goal of creating more modular server architectures. This purchase seems aimed at trying to meet that long-term threat.

Mellanox (MLNX+3.0%) has been approached several times by potential acquirers, claims CEO Eyal Waldman, but the company prefers to remain independent. Waldman adds Mellanox has a "gentleman's agreement" with #1 customer Oracle (ORCL) that the latter won't add to its 10% stake, whose value has increased considerably, and claims Mellanox's InfiniBand solutions won't see serious competition from rivals such as Intel for at least 3 years. Others are more concerned. (CFO retirement).

QLogic (QLGC-0.1%) is selling its InfiniBand adapter card and switch business to Intel (INTC) for $125M in cash. The move allows QLogic to focus on its core Fibre Channel and FCoE storage networking businesses, and is the latest in a series of moves made by Intel to bolster its networking offerings (previously). InfiniBand chipmaker Mellanox (MLNX-5.4%) is selling off on the news.